Mark Rushton

Background

About Mark Rushton

As a part of software development teams over the years, I regularly interact with many people in the software development life cycle. Whether it's evolving requirements, providing a better user experience, or creating testing and usability scenarios for the short term and posterity, my intent is always continuous improvement of software and the processes the team uses. One thing I do throughout the day is document my work activities. I write a series of point relating to the stories and defects I've worked on, chats or calls I've had, meetings attended, and other important matters. At the end of the month, I distill those lists down to a higher level overview. This makes yearly reflections and reviews easy to contract. Throughout the years, I have done a lot of reading on the history of software development and have studied heuristics. The main books I return to include "The Mythical Man-Month" by Frederick Brooks,"The Psychology of Computer Programming" by Gerald Weinberg, and "How to Solve It" by George Pólya. Knowing history can provide guidance or solutions to the problems of today. Skills and abilities: JIRA for epic, story, defect, bug, task, and sub-task management. Confluence for requirements, test scenarios, and other collaborative documents. Screencastify for creating narrated videos that demonstrate defects, bugs, change requests, general training, questions, or testing scenarios. MySQL Workbench for data verification. WinSCP and PuTTY for SFTP and SSH terminal client access. Postman for JSON data. OpenPGPStudio for creating and verifying PGP-encrypted files. Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Outlook. Numerous Chrome add-ons and third-party tools. Past use of TOAD, Paint.net, Rally, Teamtrack, ALM, and Mongo clients. Outside of work, I use Airtable, a cloud-based relational database; Streamyard, a video live-streaming service; and I regularly dig into analytics and reporting through Excel data filtering.